Yesterday an employee at a corporate Verizon gym found an unreleased Motorola Droid Shadow. The device's owner eventually returned to pick it up, but a photo and specs were still emailed to us. Hours later the gym employee was fired.

The story goes that this phone was left in a corporate Verizon gym in Washington, but before it was …
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When the device was picked up, we were told that the gym employee had a pleasant chat with the fellow who lost the phone:

The gym employee who found the device (as the story goes) managed to confirm a few details with the chap who picked it up-specifically, that it has 16GB of internal storage, runs on a Snapdragon processor, has a HDMI port, and yes, the 8MP camera and 4.3-inch screen all checked out too.

But today we discovered that this was the last pleasant conversation the guy had with a Verizon employee. This is what his close friend—who emailed us the information in the first place—said happened:

I sent in the photo and story about the Motorola Shadow that my buddy found in the gym. I just thought I'd send along an update if you were at all interested. First of all he wanted everyone to know that he is not a dwarf or a midget—despite the fact that he does have small hands. Now, believe what you want but this photo is real, it was taken by him with his camera phone while holding the Shadow (hence the awkward holding of the Shadow). One thing that he noticed in all the comments was that people wanted to know if there was a "sliding keyboard," but he said to me that "nope, there's no sliding keyboard. It's all touchscreen. The interface is REALLY easy to use and this is the fastest phone I have EVER used."

That all aside, my buddy was bombarded by calls and emails from Verizon corporate and they even showed up at his house pretty soon after you guys posted the story. He was asked to attend a few meetings in which he had to tell them exactly what happend and then they fired him.

If you would like to know more about how Verizon's security works, try this on for size: They fired him yesterday (5/25/10) at about 1 or 2pm but they didn't take his keys or keycard to the gym until they showed up at his house at about 3pm today (5/26/10). Real smart Verizon, fire someone because his friend leaked a photo of a phone that one of your executives lost and let the employee you just fired keep his keys for 24 hours.

I asked how the guy was doing after all this drama and was told that "he's fine" and that "this was his last week there anyways, because it was just an internship. But Verizon scared him pretty big time." [Thanks, tipster!]